Room

I was troubled by this book. At first, presented as a quasi-fictional account of the terrible 2008 Fritzl crimes in Austria, it sucks you in with its quite gimmicky premise: our little narrator is Jack, a 5-year-old imprisoned with his mother in a small shed somewhere in America by a villainous rapist named only “Old Nick”. Jack was born in Room, and he expects to die in Room. Everything beyond Room - “Outside” - is “in the TV”, that is, unreal. But Jack's mother (initially presented as nearly endlessly inventive and resourceful) hatches a TV-movie-esque plan to get them out of Room.

The escape, which comes midway through the book, divides the book into a before/after tale. The “before” is stronger: grim, believable, horrifying. Experiencing Room, even through Jack's relatively naive and optimistic eyes, is pretty awful. Experiencing the Outside through Jack's eyes, instead, gets sidelined into a Rainman-type social satire that was completely unneeded. This is where the author began to shine through the text more and more: the characters began to feel like caricatures, the dialogue heavy-handed, obvious and preachy. It started to feel like Jack and his Ma were being set up as quasi-spiritual figures, emerging like Mary and Jesus through a life of suffering into a kind of holy quality. Dude, they lived in a shack for five years. How is living in a shack ennobling? I started to get a bit pissed off. Indeed, I gobbled this book up - as I gobbled up other unreliable narrator confessionals (this one resembling “Flowers for Algernon”, to some degree) - but it left a very bad taste in my mouth. Especially when I read the details of the Fritzl case; again, dude, they lived in a bunker. It's horrible. And I almost feel it's unethical to leverage the sensationalist horror of their experience to make points about Plato's cave (seriously?!).